Camus himself would accept that he falls back on an unphilosophically rigorous form of essentialism 'a commitment to others' to explain how we find meaning. [2] [3] But other philosophers have found great promise in a commitment to an anti-essentialist nomadic ethics [4] that asks what 'wasted lives'[5] can tell us about what we currently value as a society and how we can expand that realm [6]. I think we can see this in how Rick practices science and rebellion simultaneously [7], but then it is just a cartoon TV show what are other people’s thoughts? are you as excited about season 3 as I am? [8]
P.S. Does anyone else find the way Rick and Morty grapples with our worst fears and anxieties [9] - having to bury our dead selves from another universe in the back yard - really comically relieving of stress. As opposed to the bad taste with which Futurama in a similar sci-fi themed show turned pulling on kids heart strings from sci-fi themed drama into a form of horror when they left the domesticated dog to die waiting his whole life for his owner Fry to come home (it was going to be Frys' mother originally)?
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References:
1. Rick and Morty - Finding Meaning in Life - youtube.com/watch?v=ez1rWBPznEc
2. In Search of Authenticity; From Kierkegaard to Camus by Jacob Golomb
3. From Solitude to Solidarity; How Camus Left Nihilism Behind - vqronline.org/articles/solitude-solidarity
4. Anarchism and Animal liberation; Essays on Complementary Elements of Total LiberationBy late 1942, shortly before he entered the French Resistance, Camus was reassessing the limits of absurdity. What would the world make of a thinker who announced: “Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over”? It didn’t matter, he shrugged. He, at least, knew it was proof that “he is worthy of thought.” Absurdity, he saw, was nothing more than a first step toward the truth. In his private journal, he wrote that the absurd “teaches nothing.” Instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Nietzsche’s superman, we must look to others: We are condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
Love saves us from absurdity. At this point, Camus shed Nietzsche: Commitment to others becomes primordial in a world streaked by the absurd. This is the subject of The Rebel, a book conceived during the occupation and published in 1952. The rebel, affirms Camus, rejects not just metaphysical, but also political absurdity: namely, a state’s insistence on giving meaning to the unjustifiable suffering it inflicts on its citizens. The rebel not only says “no” to an unspeaking universe, but also says “no” to an unjust ruler. The rebel “refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose”—to impose himself on a meaningless world, as well as on those who deny his humanity.
Most critically, however, the rebel seeks to impose a limit on his own self. Rebellion is an act of defense, not offense; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent. Ultimately, it requires an active watchfulness in regard to the humanity of others as well as oneself. Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorize one to become tyrannical in turn. The rebel does not deny his master as a fellow human being, he denies him only as his master; and he resists the inevitable temptation to dehumanize his former oppressor.
For Camus, rebellion lives only as long as does the balance between daring and prudence. Hence Camus’s embrace of a profoundly un-Nietzschean “philosophy of limits.” Since we cannot know everything, this philosophy argues that we cannot do anything we please to others. Rebellion, unlike revolution, “aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the community of man is established.” Revolution comes easily, while rebellion “is nothing but pure tension.”
Ultimately, rebellion means unending self-vigilance: It is the art of active restraint. At the end of The Rebel, Camus declared that our task is to “serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” His many critics dismissed this phrase as mere grandiloquence, a heroic glibness disguising an absence of deep thought. Yet the truth of the matter is that there is nothing glib or easy about Camus’s claim. Instead, it recognizes the difficulty, doubts, and desperation tied to true rebellion, and the realization we must live with provisional outcomes.
5. Wasted Lives by Zygmunt BaumanThis is also strikingly similar to the nomadic ethics proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, which I have explored at length elsewhere (Eloff 2010, 2013). In brief, for Deleuze nomadic ethics requires epistemological humility; it is anti-essentialist and non-normative, situated and contingent and emerges from situations themselves instead of being imposed upon them. It is an immanent ethics of experimentation that appeals to nothing outside of itself, a bio-centered, nonanthropocentric egalitarianism that recognizes our enfolding of and enfoldment within the world around us and a care for the self that is immediately a care for the not-self, for the infinitely complex web of relations within, and which are, our shared habitats. It is a practice of becoming together in constant differenciation, in affirmation of a deeper principle of difference, of differentiation, with an enhanced sense of situated accountability that “enlarges the sense of collectively bound subjectivity to non-human agents, from our genetic neighbours the animals, to the earth as a biosphere as a whole” (Braidotti 2006, p. 136).
6. The Politics of Post Anarchism by Saul Newman
7. Is Rick from Rick & Morty The Ideal Scientist? - youtube.com/watch?v=XZLN1PN3L4IThe politics of resistance to the biopolitical order of state capitalism suggests the possibility of an outside to this order; of points of rupture
and anteriority in which we see a glimpse of alternative ways of life. While we must acknowledge the pervasiveness of this order and its formidable power, we should at the same time be able to discern its cracks, vulnerabilities and inconsistencies. Massimo de Angelis makes the important point – taking a certain distance from Hardt and Negri – that the order confronted by radical political struggles today is not complete or all- encompassing: it is, on the contrary, subject to tensions, discontinuities and moments of rupture which leave openings for alternative social relationships to emerge. Indeed, he argues that there is more to our world than capitalism; that we already engage in social relationships that are not completely subsumed by capitalism, although their autonomy is always threatened by it.
It is a matter, then, of expanding the realm of these alternative practices, relationships and ‘value struggles’ – of expanding the dimension of what de Angelis calls the commons, in opposition to the colonising tendencies of capitalism. We should also recognise, with Foucault, the reversibility of power relationships, even those that seem so overwhelming; that while power might be ubiquitous, it is also characterised by instabilities and moments of resistance.
8. dailydot.com/parsec/rick-and-morty-season-3-release-date-trailer-teaser/
9. Rick and Morty Season 3 Sneak Peek on Development Meeting - youtube.com/watch?v=z91-IgdO1Wk